Customer premises equipment (CPE), which is an in-house apparatus directly connected to a network of a communication service provider (CSP), may be provided by the CSP or installed by a subscriber (or customer). That is, the CPE 110 may be located in a customer (i.e., subscriber) home, provide a connection with a communication channel provided by the CSP, and generally perform functions such as a router, a firewall, a network address translation (NAT) and a dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP). In other words, the CPE may receive traffic originating from the customer side and provide the customer with Internet connections through the communication channel, or act as a firewall for the traffic coming from the Internet.
Meanwhile, a virtual CPE (i.e., vCPE) may mean virtualization of the CPE so that the CPE network services are performed not in the home CPE but in a NFV cloud by virtualizing the CPE network services.
Among various methods of providing a vCPE service based on NFV, a method of providing a vCPE service by configuring a single NFV cloud node in the customer premises is the easiest form of business application because the number of customers affected by a failure is minimized. In this method, a cloud node is configured for only one customer, and a vCPE device is configured in the cloud node to provide a service, thereby providing the customer with the best transmission latency and exclusive use of resources.
Currently, although various vendors implement the above-described type of NFV cloud nodes, these are designed as a form in which a management interface and a data interface exist separately (i.e., a form in which a public IP address for management and a public IP address for data transfer for vCPE service). However, most small business customers are using Internet services in form of using a single DHCP-based dynamic IP address.
Therefore, in order to configure a vCPE device in a single NFV cloud node even when there is no separate management interface, a data interface should be utilized also for management. In other words, a single interface (i.e., a single IP address) should be used for management before the vCPE is configured on the NFV cloud, and used simultaneously for data networking and management after the vCPE is configured.
However, once the vCPE is configured in the cloud node, there is a problem that the data interface cannot be used for management because it exclusively uses the data interface. That is, before the vCPE is configured on the NFV cloud node, a host process of the corresponding NFV cloud node may have a connection to the Internet by using a wide area network (WAN) physical interface, but when the vCPE is configured, the vCPE uses the WAN physical interface exclusively. As a result, once the vCPE is configured, it becomes impossible to control the host process of the NFV cloud node. Also, even when the vCPE malfunctions due to a sudden failure, there is no way to remotely access the host process of the NFV cloud node to handle the failure.